I often read through the comment threads and think to myself but...but...that needs rebutted. But I never do, because if I did, that's all I would do all day every day.

But I'll make this one exception re yesterday's Pulitzers post, because there's such a basic misunderstanding of terms. My study from 2003 was about editorials, or leaders as the Brits call them. Unsigned. Some of you don't even know what category we're talking about. Frank Rich doesn't write editorials. Nor do Peggy Noonan and Kimberly Strassel. They write op-eds. The distinction isn't pedantic, but utterly crucial. The editorial is the voice of the newspaper - its institutional and official opinions and beliefs. Frank Rich's are Frank Rich's and Kim Strassel's are Kim Strassel's. If you want to say "The New York Times believes X," you can't go by Rich or MoDo. Only editorials. Get it?

That's number one. Number two, these conservative gripes about coverage of Obama, and if Bush had done X...Sometimes, sometimes, if you bother to go do the research and find the relevant articles or opinion pieces to support your point, these arguments can have merit. But if you just make some blanket assertion, you're only making yourself feel better, you're not persuading anybody.

On Obama and oil prices, I feel like I've read and heard and watched quite a lot of coverage about high gas prices, and I feel like much of that coverage has said that this is partly about Libya. That is, Obama's fault. If it's not totally dominating the headlines, maybe that's just because there's a hell of a lot else going on, and because it's not really vacation season yet. If prices are $4.29 in August when people are heading to the beach, you can believe it'll be a dominant story. And finally, if you think there has been some tacit (or explicit) decision by news outlets to go easy on Obama on the gas price question, you understand nothing about the news business and live on Neptune.

Obama gets a break on some things. Bush got a break on some things, too, especially after 9-11, when significant portions of the major media tried to mold him into the Churchill they thought Americans wanted and needed. These "breaks" usually conform to generally held perceptions about the two parties, meaning that the media will jump on stories about Republicans being mean to poor people, and on stories about Democrats being overly devoted to loopy ideas about diversity. On balance over the years, things probably tilt slightly in the Democrats' direction, but not all that much.

Now, back to my Harvard paper. You can read it here if you like (it's long). I studied editorials only from the NYT and WashPost (liberal papers) and the WSJ and WashTimes (conservative papers). I was scrupulous in my methodology, which you can read about on pages five through 13. Here's a quote from my "results" section on pages 12-13:

1. When it comes to taking policy positions, the liberal and conservative editorial pages studied are more or less equally partisan with regard to criticizing the other side. For example, The New York Times opposed the Bush tax cut about as often, and about as strongly, as The Wall Street Journal opposed the Clinton stimulus package. The conservative papers tended toward more forceful language, as we will see below, but the positions taken were roughly equivalent. However, when it came to dealing with their own side, the liberal papers were far more balanced, which leads into the second conclusion.2. As a rule, the liberal editorial pages were much more willing to criticize the Democratic administration than the conservative pages were willing to criticize the Republican administration. This happened, to be sure, in the case of Clinton signing the 1996 welfare-reform bill (i.e., going against the liberal papers' beliefs), but it also happened in other instances, leading to the conclusion that the liberal editorial pages were more evenhanded in their treatment of parallel episodes, particularly under the politics/process rubric, where the liberal papers were eight times more critical of Clinton than the conservative papers were of Bush.3. Also as a rule, the liberal editorial pages were somewhat more willing to give the Bush administration credit where they felt it was due. They were not lavish in their praise of Bush by any means; on the other hand, the conservative newspapers virtually never praised Clinton. In the 148 conservative editorials on the Clinton administration under study here, just four were deemed "positive," and three of those, as we shall see, carry rather meaningful asterisks. (Appendix B shows the numbers that support conclusions 2 and 3.)

Granted, these are fairly limited claims, just about four newspapers. I would not say my findings prove anything global about liberalism and conservatism. But I do think it's interesting. If I had to boil it down to one key set of numbers, it's these, from a study that included 510 total editorials:*The liberal papers wrote 145 editorials on the Clinton topics under study, 45 of which were negative; a third.*The conservative papers wrote 99 editorials on the Bush topics under study, and 7 were negative; 7%.

This comports with the reality I see every day. Liberal media back the Democrats in general but are more willing to be critical. Conservative media are total GOP cheerleaders. Each reality fits the mindset, because liberals are anti-authoritarian (even their own authority figures to an extent) while conservatives tend to believe in and defer to authority. Not complicated.